


Tuesday

by AshVee



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Character Death, Gen, Magic Stiles, supernatural themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-18
Updated: 2017-10-18
Packaged: 2019-01-19 04:21:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12402912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshVee/pseuds/AshVee
Summary: His father dies on a Tuesday.





	Tuesday

His father dies on a Tuesday. The EMS run-sheet reads like a clinical encounter of what he thought was the last day of his life. Unresponsive 48 year old male. Gun shot wound to the left chest exiting the midline back. Blood pressure 90/70 and dropping. Heart rate 130. Pulse oximetry 82%. No breath sounds on the left. Spinal precautions observed. Cardiac tamponade in route. Cardiac arrest, CPR initiated. Epinephrine. Bicarb. Asystole.

DOA. 

His father dies on a Tuesday. The police report reads like an accusation of what should have been the last day of his life. 273D - two officers responding to 803 North Everette. Report of white male in his forties and white female having a verbal altercation on the front lawn. Upon arrival, male (later identified as Dalton Peters) shouted at officers to leave and drew Smith and Wesson .40 S&W. Mr. Peters fired two shots at cruiser. Bystander and officers endangered. Deadly force utilized. Sheriff Stilinski struck left chest, under the vest. Medics called. Officer at side until EMS arrival. Mr. Peters to Medical Examiner.

DOS.

His father dies on a Tuesday. The obituary reads like a celebration of what the world thought was a summation of his father’s life. John Stilinski, age 48, died in the line of duty on Tuesday, February 2nd. John was a bastion of our community. He devoted his life to service, and it is with great sadness that he is survived by only a son. Services are to be held Saturday, February 6th at 10am at Haggie Funeral Home.

The funeral is a beautiful service. The entire town shows up. There are speeches and flowers, tears and photographs. Someone spliced together a series of photos and old family videos. Stiles was careful to be in the bathroom before the first notes of Vince Gill’s voice came through the funeral home speakers. He never came back out into the parlor. 

MIA.

#

His mother’s nephews pick him up just outside of Page, Arizona. They agree to take him to Chicago, where his godfather is supposed to have a bed and a bathroom with his name on it, if Stiles wants it. Which, he doesn’t really. Except, he’s still only seventeen, and the house in his father’s name appraised at eighty-five thousand. It sold for seventy-nine, and about thirty of that went to pay off the last of their bills. 

He’s still only seventeen. There’s thirty thousand dollars in a bank account in his name. He has no health insurance. His car blew up in Page. He has no family alive he’s ever met except his two cousins he’s not too sure are above board. 

Seventeen and alone because he ran. He left his cell phone sitting on the bathroom sink. He didn’t check his email. He’s seventeen, and when his father dies on a Tuesday, something in him shatters. His mother died. His grandparents. His father. His family fell apart around his head. 

And maybe his ghosts were right. Maybe it was his fault. 

So he’s seventeen, and he’s running from everyone he loves because everything he touches is destroyed. It’s traumatic and dramatic, but it’s how he feels. So, he’s sitting in the back of a beat up Chevy Impala while his eldest cousin drives through Nebraska. They’re stopping over in Albion for a work lead one of them picked up on earlier in the week. The youngest one’s some kind of insurance investigator, but Stiles told enough lies to know one when he sees one. He might not be a wolf, but he’s gotten better at instinctive judgements. 

So when they put him in a no-tell motel in the middle of Albion and bid him a goodnight before seven at night, his Spidey-Senses start tingling and he follows them to a massive, sprawling plantation house about a mile outside of town. He makes it to the house as they’re apparently just finishing their recon, and it’s with startling clarity that he realizes exactly what the house is. 

The Hale estate would have looked similar, with its massive family room, kitchen, dining hall, and more bedrooms than you could shake a stick at. This was a Pack house. The moon overhead was new, and this, with all the lights on and a faint, familial but dangerous feel to all of it, was a Pack house. 

His cousins, then, his mind fills in, are hunters. His family are hunters, and he’s struck with the question: is he going to stand there and watch his family murder a house full of wolves? He’s careful for a long moment, weighs the decision in his mind, and tosses his head back and howls with as much vitriol as his human lungs and vocal chords will allow. He knows it sounds like a bad NC-17 late night movie. He knows his own Pack would be rolling their eyes and more than likely, Derek would have threatened his voicebox by now, but he draws another breath and does it again before Dean tackles him to the ground. 

“What the hell are you doing?” 

“What the hell are you?” Stiles counters, glaring up at his cousin, and that is all the time he has before Dean is ripped off of him and tossed bodily several feet away. There are wolves in the night, now, at least ten of them, prowling around them, and one leaning over Stiles carefully.

“You smell like wolves,” the woman over him says, her voice thick with a Southern Drawl not normally heard in Nebraska. 

“I should, I only left my pack a week ago,” he says, and she’s helping him to his feet and pulling him behind her. 

“Your pack lets you wander off with hunters?” she asks, and he can’t help the scoff. “We don’t usually like visitors after dark or without notice, but your little joke was enough of a warning to keep us from being ambushed.” 

Sam and Dean are alive at least, but surrounded, and their weapons have been stripped from them. Stiles meets their betrayed but confused looks for a moment before he realizes. 

“You have no fucking idea about werewolves, do you?” he asks, like it’s a joke. “Not all wolves are feral, idiots. In fact, most of them? They’re right as fucking rain in the head. It’s hunters killing their families that tends to set them off, because wolves? The real crazy fuck ones that all you hunters seem to think they all are? They’re omegas because someone killed their alpha.”

“You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into, kid,” Dean says, and Stiles just smiles and shakes his head. 

“It’s a little late to try to indoctrinate me to the side of the hunters. My Pack doesn’t kill people. This Pack hasn’t killed any of us yet. Seem like the bloodthirsty creatures that go bump in the night to you?” 

There’s a general, muttering of amusement coupled with indignation from the Pack around them, and Stiles gives them a pleading glance. He still has to make it to Chicago, and if his ride ups and leaves him or ends up as wolf-chow, he’s going to have a problem. 

“Maybe we could sit down?” Sam asks, “Clarify some points. I lost someone to a wolf bite, someone I had to put down because she kept killing people. If I can stop that next time…” 

“I’ve been beset by hunters with no knowledge...at ten o’clock at night,” the Alpha says from beside Stiles, and he snickers as she gestures toward her home. 

When his cousins drop him off just outside of Chicago later that week, they’re different men than they’d been before. He has their cell phone number, a burner phone he’s warned not to give the number out to, and the number of a pack in Nebraska who would shelter him if needed. 

It’s the start of something, there, standing out in front of a godfather’s home that he’s never met. He touched lives, and they’d gone on without him. In the years to come, he figures that’s something he can do.

#

Stiles is nineteen when people start talking about him as more than the gangly kid that sometimes talks his way out of problems. He’s on the train, and he catches the whispered conversation between two normal appearing men. 

“We’ve been ignoring the problem for two years, Thomas. It’s not going away. They say he’s good at this sort of thing.”

“I don’t want to involve anyone outside—”

“How many more children do we have to lose?” 

The question hands between them, and Thomas looks away. Three days later, he’s sliding into a booth at a local diner he uses sometimes to meet for the first time with clients. Thomas and a man he learns is named Abraham sit across from him. 

It’s the first time he’s sought out, the first time he doesn’t just stumble into a job. It is not the last. 

#

He’s nearly twenty the first time he’s in over his head. It’s a Zilant, which if anyone can tell him the fucking difference between that mythical clusterfuck and a wyvern or a dragon, he’d be all fucking ears. Essentially, he’s sprinting through downtown Chicago in the middle of night, ducking into subways and back up onto the street, leading a near three hundred foot snake with wings on a merry chase that ends with Stiles in its mouth. 

Clumsy spaz or not, he manages to get a silver blade up and through the roof of its mouth, embedding it into the brain and giving it a good twist as the serpent’s teeth pierce through his shoulder and low on his hip. 

The thing goes into a death roll, sending Stiles smashing into the pavement, skin shredding along with his jacket and jeans. He’s sure he’s going to die there, bleeding out in the middle of the street. There’s something suddenly urgent about calling home. 

The burner slips in blood slicked finger tips, clattering to the pavement once and twice before he can type in the number from memory. 

“Whoever this is better be dying.” Scott’s voice is familiar and comforting, and the groggy threat is enough to send Stiles into gurgling laughter that sends blood running from the corner of his mouth. It’s enough to scare Scott awake. “Hello? Who is this? Where are you? What’s wrong?” 

It’s so very Scott McCall that Stiles laughs again despite the sucking sound the shoulder wound makes when he draws a breath. Lung then, he figures. 

“Hello? Please, I can’t help you if—”

“Scotty?” he says, because if he doesn’t say something he’ll go insane from just how very good Scott is to the core of him. How, despite the late hour, the young man would be willing to cross countries to help the person on the other end of the line, not even knowing their name. 

“Who is this?” The question comes again twice while Stiles tries to draw another breath. There’s blood in the street and blood in his teeth and neither is where it ought to be. 

“Scotty, I’m sorry—”

“Where are you?” Concern was something Stiles recognized in Scott’s voice. He seemed to be perpetually concerned their freshman year — grades, lacross, asthma — and that only grew once he’d become a wolf. 

“Not close,” he manages through a chest that feels too full. Emotion, blood, and a collapsed lung make it difficult to speak. There are ragged, sobbing breaths in his ear, and it takes a moment too long to figure out they were coming from the phone.

“Stiles?” Scott asks finally, as if he needs the confirmation. 

Stiles draws a breath to answer. He swears he does. The phone hits the pavement, his fingertips numb and clumsy. The city is alive around him but distant. There is a shadow across him, and he falls into it. 

#

His dies on a Tuesday. There is no EMS run sheet. No one counts his heartbeats, describes their rhythm on a cardiac monitor, checks his oxygenation or his wounds. No electronic medical record documents the slash low on his pelvis that transects muscle and tissue and organs — colon, intestine — nor the one high on his chest punctured deep through bone and into lung. 

DOA.

He dies on a Tuesday. There is no police report. Blood stains the blacktop, trailing in the little imperfections of the tarmac, skittering this way and that, until it runs into a sewer drain. There are no codes called over a radio, no emergency response. 

DOS.

The Zilant’s body is simply gone at sunrise, the fire of its soul burning away the body to ash and dust, gone in the wind. The mess behind is from a storm. The dead boy on the road is not mentioned, because he is not there. 

MIA. 

#

If he dies on a Tuesday, it is just before midnight, because he is reborn on a Wednesday, in the small hours of the night. 

There is a pulse to the world, one buried deep in the soul of things, and it is hungry for power, for a foothold. It is old magic, and it has swallowed him whole, burned him to his core, and forced his heart to beat. 

If he dies on a Tuesday, it is the start of everything. 

He wakes up on a Wednesday, in the small hours of the night.


End file.
